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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   25652 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 1, 2025

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There has been a recent crackdown on naughty games on steam and itch.io. The game platforms say the crackdown has come from payment processors. Payment processors have said they don't want their business associated with unsavory practices, and that adult products have higher charge back rates. Some people have blamed activist religious groups on aggressively lobbying the payment processors for this crackdown.

I mostly feel a sense of annoyance. My libertarian leanings have me feeling certain ways about all this.

  1. The biggest problem is that payment processors are usually an unholy alliance of governments, banks, and financial groups. This makes them allergic to competition and new entrants to the market. The Internet has reshaped society over the last three decades and I'd say only 1.5 payment processors came out of it. PayPal, and the crypto market. The term "coup complete" got thrown around a lot in the Biden presidency to describe what was necessary to build a competing Internet ecosystem.
  2. I'm worried this might signal the revival of the religious culture wars that happened in the 80s, 90s, and early 2000's. It's frustrating to me but a lot of people seem to gravitate towards religion of some kind. I think woke culture has plenty of religious elements. The atheist movement in the 2000s seemed genuinely anti-religious. But it seems the longer term strategy is just have a different religion.
  3. Neutrality as a default. This is the end goal. Once you accept that a thing is subject to politics it becomes entirely subject to politics. We are cancelling thots and porn this year. 4 years ago it was lab leak conspiracies. I certainly think some things are more important to not be censored, but the machinery of censorship seems to work regardless of the subject being censored. Once it is built it will be used.

Once you accept that a thing is subject to politics it becomes entirely subject to politics.

I’ve always felt that politics is inherently more expansive than the common definition most people have in their head. After all politics is really just figuring out how to live as a society, figuring out when collective action is needed, and finding tradeoffs. There are a lot of potential disagreements that can arise from that and stuff like how morality interacts with legality is one of those natural fronts. In that light I’d say that the role of porn in society is something that, if it ever weren’t subject to politics, was more an accident than something natural.

The natural and completely normal response of a liberal democratic society to private collective monopolies is regulation (if not trust busting) via policy choices. That’s clearly the case for the payment processors, so now that the matter comes to a head we must debate in the political realm whether we want to restrict or regulate their behavior or not. Perfectly normal.

Punishing lab leak theorists exists on a spectrum where the spectrum is subject to politics. Obviously the government regulates stuff like health claims for drugs (and sorta supplements but not really), as it should, so the government is already in the business of policing health claims, even if only in extreme cases. This is also politics, and is also natural. The fact that lab leak theorists probably shouldn’t be punished is a good and likely correct opinion to have, but it’s not immune from political discussion inherently.

After all politics is really just figuring out how to live as a society, figuring out when collective action is needed, and finding tradeoffs.

Politics is conflict resolution. Conflict resolution is a subset of Conflict. Where there is no politics, there is no conflict, and where there is politics, there is conflict. If "everything is political", then conflict is necessarily existential.

The core aim of "living in a society" is finding ways to limit the scope and scale of political conflict, to minimize the role politics plays in life so that as much of life as possible is lived outside it. Or to put it more precisely, so that life is possible, because "life outside of politics" is in fact the sort of life worth living, and "life in politics" ranges from unpleasant through wretched to, at the terminus, non-existent.

Punishing lab leak theorists exists on a spectrum where the spectrum is subject to politics.

Walking outside and eating bananas exist on a spectrum, where the spectrum is exposure to radiation; therefore, let us calmly discuss the glowing lump of cesium isotopes before us.

Every aspect of human life, action and experience exists on the spectrum of "subject to politics". Every aspect of human life, action and experience can be about politics, and unless effective limits on the scope and scale of political conflict are deployed, will be. Every aspect of human life, down to one's freedom to draw breath, can be negotiable, if we decide to allow it to be so.

Obviously the government regulates stuff like health claims for drugs (and sorta supplements but not really), as it should, so the government is already in the business of policing health claims, even if only in extreme cases.

One might frame this another way: "expressing disagreement with government policy" is already a category the government is in the business of policing, and is not immune from "political discussion", of which the government-issued truncheon is a subcategory. All this is known and agreed between us, it seems. I simply insist that, this being the reality, it should and must be my government and your expression that we "discuss" in this manner.

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